Robotic Mass Games by Distributed Hybrid Controllers

This paper addresses a problem of finding distributed controllers for the robotic mass games whose purpose is to let mobile robots organize themselves into a formation displaying a given grayscale image. As a solution to this problem, we develop three-mode hybrid controllers by combining ideas of the conventional coverage control and the halftone image processing. The roles of the three sub-controllers are to remove extra robots from the mass game field, to gather them unobtrusively, and to organize player robots into a formation displaying the image, respectively. The performance of the proposed controllers is demonstrated by numerical simulations with the standard images.